Related papers: Best play in Dots and Boxes endgames
We investigate concurrent two-player win/lose stochastic games on finite graphs with prefix-independent objectives. We characterize subgame optimal strategies and use this characterization to show various memory transfer results: 1) For a…
This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…
An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…
Exactly 20 years ago at MFCS, Demaine posed the open problem whether the game of Dots & Boxes is PSPACE-complete. Dots & Boxes has been studied extensively, with for instance a chapter in Berlekamp et al. "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical…
We revisit the coalition structure generation problem in which the goal is to partition the players into exhaustive and disjoint coalitions so as to maximize the social welfare. One of our key results is a general polynomial-time algorithm…
Matrix games constitute a fundamental problem of game theory and describe a situation of two players with completely conflicting interests. We show how methods from statistical mechanics can be used to investigate the statistical properties…
For matrix games we study how small nonzero probability must be used in optimal strategies. We show that for nxn win-lose-draw games (i.e. (-1,0,1) matrix games) nonzero probabilities smaller than n^{-O(n)} are never needed. We also…
Although mixed extensions of finite games always admit equilibria, this is not the case for countable games, the best-known example being Wald's pick-the-larger-integer game. Several authors have provided conditions for the existence of…
We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an optimization problem is presented to two…
This paper studies properties of the back end of a sorting network and illustrates the utility of these in the search for networks of optimal size or depth. All previous works focus on properties of the front end of networks and on how to…
This paper is concerned with asymptotic behaviour of a repeated game of "odds and evens", with strategies of both players represented by finite automata. It is proved that, for every $n$, there is an automaton with $2^n \cdot…
This paper investigates repeated win-lose coordination games (WLC-games). We analyse which protocols are optimal for these games, covering both the worst case and average case scenarios, i,e., optimizing the guaranteed and expected…
An algorithm based on backward induction is devised in order to compute the optimal sequence of games to be played in Parrondo games. The algorithm can be used to find the optimal sequence for any finite number of turns or in the steady…
We consider the problem of maximizing the minimum (weighted) value of all components of a vector over a polymatroid. This is a special case of the lexicographically optimal base problem introduced and solved by Fujishige. We give an…
We introduce quantum XOR games, a model of two-player one-round games that extends the model of XOR games by allowing the referee's questions to the players to be quantum states. We give examples showing that quantum XOR games exhibit a…
We provide a self-contained introduction to finite extensive games with perfect information. In these games players proceed in turns having, at each stage, finitely many moves to their disposal, each play always ends, and in each play the…
We initiate the study of simple games from the point of view of combinatorial topology. The starting premise is that the losing coalitions of a simple game can be identified with a simplicial complex. Various topological constructions and…
The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…
Markov chains are an important example for a course on stochastic processes because simple board games can be used to illustrate the fundamental concepts. For example, a looping board game (like Monopoly) consists of all recurrent states,…
The recent popularity of Wordle has revived interest in guessing games. We develop a general method for finding optimal strategies for guessing games while avoiding an exhaustive search. Our main contributions are several theorems that…